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Here's some relevant perspective, via a sidebar in Steven Malanga's Autumn 2012 City Journal feature Airfields of Dreams:

Will the Aerotropolis Fly?

From St. Louis to Detroit to Memphis to Denver, the idea of the “aerotropolis” has become increasingly fashionable. As John Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, defines it, the futuristic term describes a city that has grown around an airport, providing residents and businesses with super-quick access to global networks of commerce and travel. Some of these cities, Kasarda imagines, will be built from the ground up. A striking example is South Korea’s New Songdo, currently rising on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea and connected by bridge to one of the world’s busiest airports, Incheon International. But existing cities, Kasarda suggests, could also evolve over time into aerotropolises.

Enamored with Kasarda’s idea, cities that have seen their air traffic vanish are trying to lure it back by promoting themselves as the first American aerotropolises. The concept is a tough sell, though. Trying to make up for the loss of 60 percent of its passenger traffic, Lambert–St. Louis International Airport has tried to turn itself into a cargo hub centered on trade with China, hoping to generate a wave of development. Lambert officials have had numerous meetings with Chinese investors, who are seeking significant government incentives, including $360 million in tax breaks, to build new warehouses around the airport. These demands have helped stall the plan, with budget-crunched legislators hesitating to award fat incentives to businesses at a time when they’re slashing services to residents. Critics note, too, that Lambert already spent $1 billion on a previous expansion intended to secure the airport’s prominence as a passenger hub—a move that failed. And as two University of Missouri professors pointed out in a newspaper op-ed: “If the Aerotropolis won’t fly without public subsidies, that means private venture capitalists think the project is a loser and won’t risk their money.”

If there’s any city whose airport might seem likely to spawn a surrounding aerotropolis, it’s Memphis, home of Federal Express, which has turned the city’s airport into the second-largest cargo hub in the world. Hoping to capitalize on that relationship at a time when Delta has cut some 25 percent of its passenger flights at Memphis International Airport, city leaders have rolled out the slogan “Memphis: America’s Aerotropolis” and are marketing the area to businesses looking for a location that allows them to plug in to global networks.

But Memphis’s experience illustrates a problem with the viability of the aerotropolis idea: many businesses don’t want to locate in industrialized airport settings—which tend to be ugly and lacking urban amenities—just for the sake of easy airport access. Even FedEx, which employs thousands of cargo handlers at the airport, has been moving its front-office employees to suburban office developments, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of square feet of unused space. The office district around Memphis International Airport now has the highest vacancy rate in the city, north of 50 percent. A stark symbol of the area’s struggles is a four-story office building named Aerotropolis Center, which has been vacant for five years.

Denver International Airport may have a better shot at giving rise to an aerotropolis. Opened in 1995, the airport is surrounded by miles of undeveloped land. One 1,287-acre site adjoining the airport has already been slated for retail, hotel, and office space. But the development is possible only because the airport is 30 miles from downtown Denver, in the city of Aurora, where there’s plenty of room to expand, far more than in the congested urban settings of many current major airports. That kind of free space may be the key, at least in the short term, to creating an American airport city.